Nicholson Baker told The New York Times Magazine that when he was in college, he and his friends would give dramatic readings from the letters (allegedly) written to Penthouse magazine, the ones that often begin "I never thought I'd be writing this, but ..."

He went on to become a versatile, stylish author of novels ("The Anthologist"), history ("Human Smoke"), a memoir about his obsession with John Updike ("U and I") and a fascinating account of how libraries destroyed old newspapers ("Double Fold").

Baker also wrote two sexually charged novels -- "Vox" and "The Fermata" -- but the first is experimental in form (it's an account of a phone sex conversation) and the second is a science fiction premise with a juvenile twist (a man has the power to freeze time and uses it to undress women).

None of that, not even the dialogue in "Vox," gave any indication that Baker was cooking up something truly weird. "House of Holes," his new novel, is nothing more or less than a high-toned collection of Penthouse letters, cleverly written and tarted up with linguistic flourishes for a literary audience but with no unifying premise other than the subtitle ("a book of raunch") and the author's febrile imagination. Instead of Penthouse's fantasy world where every nurse and cable TV repairman is sexually voracious and nobody thinks about commitment, disease or children, Baker has invented an amusement park, the House of Holes, that people fall into and have his -- I mean, their -- fantasies fulfilled. It's a Neverland of the nether regions and while it is amusing in small bites, the novel quickly becomes singsong and silly.

Take the opening of "Ned Gets Sniffed" a typical chapter and one of the few with more than two sentences in a row that can be quoted in this newspaper:

"Ned tapped the ball on the seventh green, using his new teryllium putter. It made an odd tight circle around the hole and then dropped in. 'Did you see that weirdness?' said Ned, looking around for his golfer friends. But they were talking and hadn't seen it. No matter. Ned leaned to pull out the ball and heard strange sounds coming from the hole. He got down on his stomach to listen better. A woman's voice said, 'Hi, Ned, my name is Tendresse. Come talk to me in the House of Holes.'

"'All right,' said Ned. Immediately his head was jerked and stretched and twisted and atomized, and he was sucked powerfully down into the seventh hole. And then, a minute later, he rematerialized on a hillside full of clover and Queen Anne's lace, still wearing his golf hat, still holding his teryllium putter, but now without any pants on, just his black Eddie Bauer Sports briefs. A small discreet sign in the grass said 'All Bets Are Off.'"

That sign isn't kidding. Everything is up for grabs, quite literally, in the House of Holes. A man loses his right arm in a sort of Faustian bargain and both (the man and the arm) continue to have fulfilling sex. Something similar happens to a man and his head. All sorts of body parts are separated from their owners and later joyously reattached. Everything is relentlessly cheerful and sex-positive and downright goofy.

Much has been made of Baker's inventive language and unusual new ways of describing what people have been doing since time began. There are a lot of light, witty sentences in "House of Holes" -- no one who reads it will be able to hear the name Malcolm Gladwell without smiling -- but ultimately it's too boring and shallow to succeed as literature. If "House of Holes" was submitted to Penthouse, the editors probably would get a few laughs out of it before rejecting it as too bizarre. Nobody would believe this.